Gaming systems for playing games of chance have become popular and increasingly common in a large number of different jurisdictions, for the purpose of providing entertainment and recreation to users thereof.
In its simplest form, a gaming system consists of a standalone player station, which offers a player a menu of one or more games of chance that the player can select for play. The games of chance have outcomes that are determined by random events, usually generated by means of a random number generator implemented in software. In an alternative topology, the gaming system may be a distributed one, in which one or more player stations are connected to a remote gaming server by means of a communication network. In the standalone implementation, the software random number generator executes locally within the player station itself, while in the distributed implementation, the software random number generator executes in the gaming server and serves each one of the remote player stations.
It will be appreciated by those skilled in the art that the software random number generator is a critical component of such a gaming system, as unreliability or failure of the random number generator renders the gaming system inoperative. This is particularly so in a distributed topology where multiple player stations rely on a single random number generator, as failure of the random number generator will have an impact on every one of the player stations. In order to minimise the possibility of failure of the random number generator, it is customary for the random number generator to be implemented on a high-reliability gaming server, which is unnecessarily expensive.